Jesus Freak

I just finished a book that put my “I’m only passionate about Jesus crucified” idea to the test. The author, whose faith and relationships had been on the rocks, came back to Jesus in a liturgical church because of “a piece of bread.” She then became obsessed with giving other people “a piece of bread” and eventually ran a volunteer food pantry right around the church altar for 800 people. Every Friday night.  She met people who were drunk, addicted, poor, runaway, lost, foreign, gay, young, old, sane, crazy, sincere, and on the take. It transformed her.

This is what she says. “Embrace the wrong people. Jesus isn’t looking for the most religious people but the most trusting…God deliberately chooses the stranger, the outcast, the foreigner, the sick and the unclean—in short, the wrong people, to show the scope of his love. We, on the other hand, exclude people because outcasts define the center. We hear an accent and we know we aren’t the foreigners. We see a guy who acts like a fag, and we know we’re the real men. We see the slow kids sitting by themselves in the junior high lunch room, and we know we’re normal. And in the church, of course, we need heretics in order to establish orthodoxy. So outcasts are essential because they define the norm for the rest of the community.

“And the laws of religion, then and now, thrive on our need for outcasts. They codify who’s in and who’s out, what’s a right day for healing, and what’s a wrong one, who’s pure and who[is] untouchable. Then the priests, as Jesus knew well, become the only ones allowed to pronounce someone healed or contaminated, the only ones who can establish who’s in and who’s out. It’s a system that the world—and religion—run well on.

“Religion is a set of ideas about God…not an ongoing relationship with God. And from religion springs sin: the attempt to separate ourselves from others, the failure to see everyone [as beloved by God]. The feverish wish to practice correct religion with the right kind of people. The inability to comprehend that other human beings, not like me, are human beings and [are vital for me] precisely because they are not like me…”

The tornado moving this woman to Oz is the stream of human beings surrounding her every week that are nothing like her. This is what incarnation means, to move among people not like me and love them. It’s how Jesus saved us and how he uses us to bring his salvation to one another. It can be through the hospitality of an abbey, or a food pantry, or a dinner table at someone’s house. It can be through eating suicidally hot chile sauce with Mixtecs or a snack with a child at VBS. There’s a reason that when God sent Peter to the Gentile Cornelius, he first showed him a sheet full, not of doctrines, but of food. Peter knew the doctrine, but that wasn’t enough. It never is. “There are no unclean foods,” God was insisting through a whole sheet of food, “because there are no unclean people. Go eat with them. Share a meal with them.”

The hardest thing I struggled with as I read past the opening of this book (because there were other things that made me say, “WHOA!”) was that the author’s gay. She calls herself Jesus Freak and preaches a resurrected Savior and Lord, but she’s gay. The first time she mentioned talking “to her wife,” I put the book down.

And I realized that after all my words about incarnating Jesus, I still have “unclean people” on my list, people I would have trouble listening to, believing, or trusting. I judge. I do. I tune these people out. But is this what Jesus does? Is there a way to disagree with this woman who confesses Jesus like I do but has a wife? Can I hear her without pre-judging? I’m sure she’s asking the very same question about people like me.